International Business Machines (IBM) posted the strongest revenue growth in ten years in the fourth quarter. This was mainly due to the growth of the cloud activities to which the company is increasingly committed.
Turnover rose 6.5 percent year on year to $16.7 billion. With that, the 110-year-old IBM performed better than analysts had expected. As a result, the stock climbed more than 5 percent in after-hours trading on Wall Street.
Cloud revenues grew 16 percent. IBM has spun off its services for managing relatively old IT systems to focus even more on the cloud. Under the leadership of CEO Arvind Krishna, the company is also focusing more emphatically on consulting and artificial intelligence.
The American technology group, nicknamed Big Blue, posted a net profit of more than $2.3 billion. That was nearly $1.4 billion a year earlier.
